1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to design support for hardware such as a computer and electronic device, software, and a system including a combination of hardware and software.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a system specification description language for describing a specification at system level without discrimination between hardware and software has been developed. With this development of the language, an environment for consistent specification description from a specification at system level to specified software or hardware specifications based on the same specification format has been improving. With the advent of such system specification description languages, several new design methodologies have been proposed.
A rapid prototyping tool (Rapid or BetterState) is known, which provides a design environment in an upstream stage of system design while checking a system specification.
A characteristic feature of such a rapid prototyping tool is that system analysis and design can be seamlessly and quickly performed by using hierarchical state transition diagrams. From the viewpoint of specification design at system level at which a specification implementation method is not clear, this tool has a merit of allowing efficient design by hierarchically combining interrupt execution, sequential execution, and parallel execution. In addition, products in other upstream system analysis processes can be easily converted into the corresponding system-level specification descriptions.
On the other hand, these techniques have a weak point in a detailing process accompanying implementation of designed specifications. For example, in implementation of software using a programming language such as the C language or implementation of hardware using HDL (Hardware Description Language) or the like, concepts such as “parallel” and “interrupt” which these implementation languages do not directly embed must be translated by the corresponding implementation language. Such operation is not necessarily efficient. This problem becomes noticeable when a system specification is complicated due to a hierarchical combination.